Self-Appointed Spokesman
During the more than five decades that passed before the CIA released its holdings on Hoettl, the former Nazi spent much of his time presenting his side of the story. In 1950, using the pseudonym Walter Hagen, he published Die Geheime Front, which was re-published in English four years later as The Secret Front: The Story of Nazi Political Espionage. He followed with Unternehmen Bernhard: ein historischer Tatsachenbericht über die grosste Geldfalschungsaktion aller Zeiten (Operation Bernhard: A Historically Factual Account of the Greatest Counterfeiting Operation of All Time). Hoettl had played a role in Operation Bernhard, a German scheme to produce counterfeit Allied currency and use it to undermine the Americans and the British. Published in English under the title Hitler's Paper Weapon in 1955, this book remains a leading source of information on how the Germans disposed of their false money after the war. Just last year, American underwater experts scoured the bottom of Toplitzsee, a lake near Hoettl's former home in Austria, for sunken Nazi treasures. Like earlier such expeditions in Austria, this one recovered crates of false currency dumped by the SS in the spring of 1945.³

By the 1980s, Hoettl had become a self-appointed spokesman for the surviving figures of the Third Reich. Sought by journalists and historians alike for information about the Nazi era, he continued to provide grist for students of the Third Reich. In 1979, shortly after the broadcast of the American television miniseries "The Holocaust" in West Germany, a 16-year-old West German named Frank Brandenburg embarked on a special mission. He was intrigued by the Third Reich and yet horrified by its crimes, and he wanted to learn more about the Nazi years from participants who still lived in West Germany and Austria. Over the course of seven years, he visited their homes and gained the confidence of some of Nazi Germany's leading personalities.

In 1990, Ib Melchior, an American author and former US Army Counter Intelligence Corps agent in World War II, recounted Brandenburg's adventures in Quest: Searching for Germany's Nazi Past: A Young Man's Story. Brandenburg, according to Melchior, provided "old-time Nazi cadres" with a voice to convey their versions of history. Brandenburg listened and took notes, but he was careful to maintain some emotional distance from his hosts and to avoid being taken in by their reminiscences. He told Melchior, "Many of the people I talked to were charming and likeable. They flattered me—and all of us are apt to respond at least a little bit to flattery. They extolled the past and minimized its shortcomings.... But in some cases I was confronted with defensive statements, evasion, self-exoneration and prejudiced portrayals of the facts."⁴

Brandenburg also visited the home of Wilhelm Hoettl, by then one of the last surviving members of the Reichsicherheitshauptamt VI (RSHA-VI), the foreign intelligence branch of the German Main Security Office. Hoettl, who ended the war as an SS Sturmbannführer, or major, had served in intelligence roles in southern and southeastern Europe and thus could provide an unusual perspective on wartime and post-war activities. After regaling Brandenburg with his adventures, he boasted to his visitor that "I never had to face a court...either German or Allied. I was, of course, arrested, because of my rank and position. For investigative purposes. But the examiners soon realized that I was an anständiger Mensch (respectable person), and I was released. Furthermore, the Allied authorities de-Nazified me, as they called it." Hoettl gave what Brandenburg called his "short bark of a laugh."⁵

Project MOUNT
Hoettl, however, was not laughing in 1945 as the Allies were racing across what was left of the Third Reich. But he made the best of a bad situation. Even before the war's end, he had drawn the attention of senior US officials including Maj. Gen. William J. Donovan, the Director of Strategic Services (OSS). In the spring of 1945, Hoettl acted as an intermediary for senior Nazi officials, including Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, RSHA chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and an assortment of Austrians. All of these people were seeking their own terms with the Western Allies.6

Allen Dulles, who was then the OSS Station chief in Switzerland, reported that "Hoettl's record as a SD man and collaborator [with] Kaltenbrunner is of course bad and information provided by him [is] to be viewed with caution, but I believe he desires to save his skin and therefore may be useful." OSS Headquarters, however, regarded Hoettl's dealings as a ploy by Himmler and refused to enter negotiations.⁷

Hoettl was captured in Austria, along with other senior Nazis, by the US 80th CIC Detachment at the end of the war.⁸ He then offered the Americans a "complex of agents in Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Jugoslavia, Montenegro and Albania, capable of reporting high-level political and military information."⁹ Hoettl claimed that his radio net, known as the "Center," still existed in Austria and could communicate with his isolated agents behind Soviet lines using a group of Hungarian cryptographers. These elements, he maintained, could be resurrected under American control if he gave them the signal.¹⁰

At that time, X-2, OSS's counterespionage branch, was playing a leading role in what the OSS called Project MOUNT, an American operation to exploit German wartime covert signals intelligence. As part of that effort, two X-2 officers—Capt. Eric Timm in Munich (where Hoettl had been taken in May 1945) and Capt. William B. Browne in Steyerling, Austria—used members of Hoettl's "Center" net to contact its agents in Budapest and Bucharest. Only routine, non-substantive messages were being sent, however, in an effort to lower the risk of exposure and hold the entire ring together until a final determination of Allied policy toward Hoettl's offer could be made. Some American officers, meanwhile, voiced concern about operating a net behind Soviet lines at a time when the USSR was still officially regarded as a military ally.

Capt. Timm in Munich raised several possible alternative explanations for Hoettl's offer:

Lt. Col. Andrew H. Berding, X-2's chief in Germany, told Gen. Donovan on 8 June about Hoettl's offer to turn over his network. In a series of lengthy memoranda, Col. Berding recounted the MOUNT project's history and implications. He forcefully urged that OSS "secure from Hoettl the last syllable of information that he is able to furnish us on the Balkan networks." Berding also observed that Hoettl was "not in the slightest degree actuated by a fatherly concern for the well-being of the American intelligence services; most of what he has to gain must lie in the empoisoning of Russian-American relationships." Berding therefore urged that the Americans tell the Soviets about Hoettl's system and recommend to them that both powers jointly exploit it "in behalf of general Allied security."¹²

Although Gen. Donovan had authorized X-2 on 10 June to maintain radio contact for counterespionage purposes, the MOUNT project quickly dissolved after the Soviet NKVD presented the OSS with specific questions about the German operation.¹³ On 21 August, Donovan informed the OSS in Germany that the "JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] has now authorized OSS to execute proposed liquidation of Hoettl network in collaboration with the Russians as simply and promptly as possible."¹⁴

Members of X-2, including Capt. Browne in Austria, were chagrined. As early as 24 June, Browne had reported to Lt. Col. Berding on the importance of the MOUNT operation for postwar US intelligence:

An Adroit Opportunist

In September 1945, US Army officials concluded that Hoettl had been "of great assistance to Allied counterintelligence by debunking the myth of a prepared plan to continue operations after defeat." The Army noted, however, that Hoettl is "a skilled opportunist and a firm believer in his own indispensability."¹⁶ After interrogating him at the Third US Army Interrogation Center, the Army transferred him to Nuremberg as a witness for the International Military Tribunal.

Between 1945 and 1947, the Americans held Hoettl in Nuremberg and Dachau for further interrogations in support of Allied war crimes prosecutions. He provided American interrogators with a significant amount of information about German intelligence activities and personalities.¹⁷ He also shared with the Americans some insights as to how the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Mueller, could have escaped from Berlin.¹⁸

In his most memorable testimony, Hoettl recounted a meeting at his home in Budapest in August 1944 with Adolf Eichmann, the "Architect of the Final Solution." According to Hoettl, Eichmann was depressed about the German war effort and his own situation. He acknowledged that he would rank among the chief war criminals sought by the Allies for his role in the roundup and massacre of Europe's Jews. When asked by Hoettl how many Jews had perished, Eichmann put the number at six million, including four million in German concentration camps.¹⁹

After he was freed in 1947, Hoettl returned to Austria, where he remained active in intelligence circles into the 1950s. The CIA was especially distrustful of the former SS officer. One Agency officer who had interrogated Hoettl characterized him as a "born intriguer and a dyed-in-the-wool Austrian Nazi" who had "delivered a sufficient number of Nazi war criminals to the gallows, unbeknownst to his former associates, to afford us a strong hold over him."²⁰ Notwithstanding any such "hold," the Agency refused to have anything to do with Hoettl, although it spent considerable time and resources tracking his activities and contacts.²¹

For many years Hoettl continued to surface occasionally in the news. In 1961, Hungary unsuccessfully sought his extradition as an accomplice of Adolf Eichmann, who was then facing trial in Israel.²²

Beyond the End of the Road
Hoettl died peacefully in 1999, two years after publishing his final book, Einsatz für das Reich (On the Reich's Mission).²³ He had become a respected citizen, serving for many years as principal of a private school. In 1995, the Austrian Government presented him with a state honor. By all appearances, Hoettl had successfully evaded any serious taint from his past.

In the foreword to his last book, Hoettl cautioned future historians against relying solely upon documents to the exclusion of personal accounts of eyewitnesses. He presumably was thinking ahead to the time when those (like himself) who could give first-hand accounts of World War II would no longer be alive and historians would be wholly dependent on documentary evidence.

Members of the Interagency Working Group, in an evaluation of the CIA's documents on Hoettl, offered this commentary:

Writing in 1953, Hoettl exclaimed: "the German Secret Service is broken and scattered both to East and West. Some serve the Americans and some the Russians. Others lie low and watch which way the wind blows. Some play with fire on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and some in South America and the Middle East have taken with them the unrest that surrounded them here."²⁵ Where did Hoettl fit in that picture? The CIA's "name file" provides leads about his wartime and postwar intelligence roles, but Hoettl's true allegiance remains a mystery even after his death.

CIA History Staff

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Nikita and the Nukes
Why was Nikita Khrushchev in such a hurry to deploy these missiles abroad—something he had hitherto rejected? After all, as his son Sergei has pointed out, the Soviet leader was even hesitant to deploy the R-5M inside the USSR near its Western border, recalling how quickly German troops had overrun Red Army defenses in 1941.²⁷

Khrushchev's sense of urgency, it seems, stemmed from the Berlin crisis, which Khrushchev had initiated in November 1958 in an effort to force the US, Britain, and France to withdraw from the post-World War II four-power division. To the Soviets, the Western presence in the divided city posed a potential challenge to their control of Eastern Europe. Khrushchev and his colleagues in the senior leadership apparently saw that presence as a Trojan horse filled with echelons of military and intelligence personnel. Additionally, many thousands of East German political and economic refugees—up to 1.5 million in the 1950s—had fled, using Berlin as an escape route to the West, where the West German Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) was threatening to draw the East German, Polish, and Czechoslovak satellite nations away from Moscow's orbit.

Three years earlier, the mercurial Soviet leader had threatened to use nuclear weapons against Britain, France, and Israel after they seized the Suez Canal. But the threat was a hollow one at that point the R-5M was not ready yet. Even so, it apparently was far enough along to prompt Khrushchev to focus on how he might use it for diplomatic purposes. According to son Sergei: "Tests of the R-5M equipped with a nuclear warhead had a noticeable influence on my father's behavior in the subsequent negotiations with our former allies, especially with Britain and France. The Soviet Union now possessed a weapon of unsurpassed power."²⁸ How many missiles would it take to destroy England and France, Khrushchev asked missile designer Sergei Korolyov? Before Korolyov could answer, Dmitri Ustinov, chairman of the Military-Industrial Commission and a future defense minister, replied: "Five. A few more for France—seven or nine, depending on the choice of targets."

At the height of the Berlin crisis in 1959, Khrushchev was claiming that the USSR could produce rockets "like sausages on an assembly line." That proved to be just another Soviet bluff, but one that the United States took seriously until the 1960s, when CORONA satellite imagery eased the "missile gap" fears. Four of the missiles deployed in East Germany were aimed at Thor missile sites—Britain's nuclear deterrent—near Norfolk and Lincolnshire; others were targeted against US airbases in Western Europe. Some may have been aimed at key Atlantic port cities to dissuade the United States from intervening after a Soviet attack if it were deprived of troop-landing facilities.

Khrushchev Abruptly Backs Off: "Live Oak" a Factor?
Notwithstanding the frenetic activity, the Soviet leader suddenly changed his mind and ordered the missiles withdrawn. During August and September 1959, the 72nd Engineers Brigade pulled back to Kaliningrad, the Baltic port city and Soviet enclave in the former East Prussia. Why the retreat? The archives do not give an answer. But we can speculate. The Berlin crisis had reached a fever pitch, and the West seemed determined to stand its ground despite—or perhaps because of—Soviet harassment of US, British, and French convoys making the 100-mile trip along the Helmstedt-Berlin Autobahn.

When his senior advisers said the Americans would fight rather than acquiesce, Khrushchev dismissed the warning as "nonsense." Now, however, his worst fear war with the West threatened to become a reality. In April 1959, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had created a secret NATO staff codenamed "Live Oak" which, in the event of a repeat of the 1948 Berlin Blockade, was to challenge the Soviets while reasserting Western access rights to Berlin. (Eisenhower's military planners doubted that the United States could replicate the 1948-1949 airlifts, concluding that the United States would have to withdraw from Berlin or fight for the right to remain there.)

The "Live Oak" organization was one of the Cold War's most closely guarded secrets. It was not officially acknowledged until 1987 and did not disband until minutes before Germany was reunified on 3 October 1990. Although not part of NATO, NATO's commander-in-chief, always an American four-star general, commanded "Live Oak," which was staffed by American, British, and French officers and soldiers. "Live Oak" war planners devised options to assert four-power rights in Berlin that encompassed "a range of plans, from sending an unarmed convoy down the autobahn to see whether the Soviets really were blocking access, to increasing levels of force," according to Dr. Gregory Pedlow, NATO's official historian and a former CIA historian.²⁹

One option called for sending an entire division into East Germany, with orders to engage the Soviets if they resisted. The possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons was kept open. In addition, a year earlier the Strategic Air Command had instituted a new alert system that featured keeping B-52s armed with atomic bombs in the air on a 24/7 basis.

If "Live Oak" was such a closely guarded secret, how did Khrushchev find out about it? In his memoirs, East German spymaster Markus Wolf claims he obtained "Live Oak" planning documents, signed by NATO commander Gen. Lauris Norstad, from an agent inside British military headquarters in West Germany.³⁰ If the plans were meant to intimidate the Soviets and their allies, they appear to have succeeded. "I am not prone to panic, but Live Oak chilled me to the core," Wolf wrote.³¹ Khrushchev scared him as much, if not more, by committing his personal prestige to expelling the three Western powers from Berlin. "Great powers," Wolf observed, "have gone to war often enough to protect the fragile prestige of their leaders."

Khrushchev may have concluded that discretion and concessions were the better part of valor. In July 1959, President Eisenhower invited him to Washington. Arriving in September, he became the first Soviet leader to visit the United States. His decision to withdraw the missiles may have been a tacit signal of his desire to end the crisis. He also withdrew his Berlin ultimatum during the summit. But less than two years later, with Kremlin approval, the East Germans erected the Berlin Wall to halt the flow of refugees.

Khrushchev's colleagues on the Presidium removed him from power in 1964. Those who spoke against him focused on his failed domestic policies, but they also noted that he had taken the USSR to the brink of war three times—over Suez, Berlin, and Cuba—in less than a decade. His strategy of bluff and bluster had failed. Ironically, it also contributed to the subsequent nuclear arms race, as the new regime under Leonid Brezhnev sought to fill in the gaps in Khrushchev's missile strategy.

Lesson: Role of Intelligence
This episode underscores the important but often hidden role intelligence played during the Cold War. It also shows how factoring in the intelligence variable can give an old story new twists and revise what was once conventional wisdom. In the case at hand, it took more than ten years and an accidental discovery in the Soviet archives to bring new information to light. One wonders how many historical examples are waiting to be discovered.

CIA History Staff

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